Oh my stars! What a charming code-cracking game. I cracked the code on my second playthrough so I got to see both endings. I had a good time with it, and I appreciate that it brought a little bit of fun narrative and humor to a puzzle game. Here are my playtest notes in case you decide to make a post-jam release:
-More visual feedback for symbols you get wrong. Since naturally my first several guesses had no correct symbols, I couldn’t tell whether the console was doing anything.
-Recommend adding audio feedback for correct and incorrect solutions. The instant feedback would help alleviate potential confusion, and it would add the little bit of “juice” that makes the feeling of guessing correctly feel really good.
-When I used the Intelligence Action that would highlight 3 (with one being a symbol in the sequence), the highlighted square covered up the actual symbol
-In the Intelligence Action that let me pick a column, I would have liked to be able to reference the board to choose but the popup that let me pick blocked it.
-For green and locked, the instructions say “why would you want to move a correct symbol”. But after I got a few green + locked, I had fewer slots to test and eliminate additional symbols. It could add a small strategic choice to let players not have them take up a slot.
-Consider adding the ability to click symbols to add them to the console